Filling in the blanks is no way to fight for abortion rights

October 26, 2012|Eric Zorn | Change of Subject

I approve of what Terry Cosgrove says, but I will fight to the death against the way he says it.

Pardon my corruption of Voltaire's famous saying. It's inspired by a new round of political attacks from Personal PAC, the Chicago-based pro-abortion-rights organization with a commitment to the cause that exceeds its commitment to the truth.

Example: Voters in the near northwest suburbs this week received a Personal PAC mailing supporting the candidacy of incumbent Democratic State Sen. Dan Kotowski of Park Ridge and charging that his Republican challenger "Jim O'Donnell would vote for an Illinois law that would make abortion illegal with NO EXCEPTIONS for victims of rape and incest!"

Cosgrove, Personal PAC's president and CEO, has an unusual way of defining the views of politicians. He sends them his candidate questionnaire — 31 questions on five pages this campaign season — and adds the warning at the beginning and the end that "failure to return this completed questionnaire will result in our assuming your opposition to ALL our positions on reproductive matters."

Republicans who neither seek nor hope for Personal PAC's endorsement and so toss the questionnaire in the trash are asking for a Cosgrove beat down.

Republican business owner Joe Neal of north suburban Wadsworth, who is running for an open state Senate seat against Democrat Melinda Bush, took that chance recently. In return, voters in his district received a Personal PAC mailer that read in part, "As a state senator, on every vote every time, Joe Neal opposes women making their own personal decisions. Even when a woman has been raped or is a victim of incest."

A footnote cites the Personal PAC questionnaire.

Neal is not a state senator (at least not yet) and so has never cast a vote on abortion. In an interview Thursday, he told me that, to the limited extent he's animated by the issue, he does favor allowing exceptions for rape and incest, even though his primary-season campaign literature promised he will "always vote to protect life."

But back to O'Donnell. He neither discarded nor filled out Cosgrove's questionnaire. Instead he replied with a one-page letter answering yes or no to 24 of the 31 questions — none of which directly mentions rape or incest, by the way. Though his answers reflect a general opposition to abortion, they do indicate his support for state Planned Parenthood funding, mandatory contraceptive coverage and comprehensive sex education in the schools, as well as his opposition to laws that would criminalize abortion.

Cosgrove ignored the letter — it wasn't signed, he pointed out — and generated the flier portraying O'Donnell as an anti-choice extremist.

When I say I approve of what Cosgrove says, I mean that I share his strong support of abortion rights and his view that those rights are being jeopardized even by those lawmakers who seem to stake out moderate positions. In O'Donnell's answers, for instance, he indicates support for mandatory ultrasound testing prior to abortion.

And when I say I will fight to the death against the way he says it, I mean I will write strongly worded columns — this is my second — calling rubbish on his infamous tactics.

Personal PAC has a legitimate concern. The candidate database of the anti-abortion Illinois Citizens for Life says that at least nine out of the 18 Illinois Republican U.S. House candidates this year have declared their opposition to abortion even in cases of rape and incest. The same roster shows this view is shared by 28 of 41 Republicans running for state Senate and 40 out of 68 Republicans running for the state House.

And though the roster is incomplete (the positions of 20 GOP candidates are listed as unknown) and may contain more than the one error I found (it wrongly puts state Sen. Carole Pankau of Itasca in the no-exceptions category), it suggests a party in the grips of its most socially conservative element. Some 60 percent of its candidates have embraced a strict anti-abortion position that poll after poll shows is held by only about 20 percent of the population.

That position has implications. And Cosgrove is right to demand what criminal penalties (how much prison time) they'd impose on women who obtain abortions if they're ever able to outlaw the practice.

But it discredits his cause to exaggerate — "lie" is not too strong a word — in making his attacks. There's no need for him to invent extremists when they're already all over the ballot.